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Date: Fri, 22 Sep 1995 15:00:45 +0600
To: ejon@ll.mit.edu (Eric `two cats' Jones)
From: tyork@vt.edu (Thayer York)
Subject: Re: bootmanager problems
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
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At 09:24 AM 9/20/95 -0400, Eric `two cats' Jones wrote:
>I'm afraid we may be earning the wages of sin for having bought IDE-based
>systems.  There is something bogus about the way ATAPI CDROM's work (at
>least mine).  When I disconnect the CDROM from the IDE cable, my system
>boots like a dream...even sees my 2nd IDE controller.

IDE in general, I don't know.  An IDE CD-ROM does seem to be at least a
minor sin.  I did try disconnecting the CD-ROM and doing a reboot.  The
BootEasy menu still only listed DOS and when I hit F5 I had the same problem
as before.

>  So.  We've narrowed the problem down to 1) Booteasy not correctly loading
>the 2ndary (?) boot code, or 2) the secondary boot code not working
>properly, in the presence of HD+CDROM on 2nd IDE controller.

As I mentioned, in my case it doesn't seem to like booting from the 2nd IDE
controller at all, although there was no trouble seeing it during the install.

>>dept. at my school, Virginia Tech) let me ask a pretty basic question.  If I
>>can't get BootEasy to work, is it possible to set up the system to boot from
>>a floppy and then somehow switch to using the the installation of FBSD that
>>resides on the hard drive (so I don't have to keep that floppy in the entire
>>time I'm using the system)?
>
>Yes.  If you stick the install boot floppy in and boot your machine, it
>will come up with a "Boot:" prompt.  You could type 'wd(1,a)' (no quotes)
>to that prompt and it'll _try_ to boot the kernel on your hard disk.  Or
>maybe that's not what you wanted to do.  Were you hoping to boot a kernel
>off the floppy and then switch root to wd1?  I'm not sure...experts?

That's exactly what I want to do - start from a floppy but boot the kernel
from the hard disk.  Now the problem is I don't have a boot floppy.  The
copy I got from the school came on a CD that they put together and it
included a copy of a kernel and a DOS-based utility (fbsdboot.exe) to boot
off a DOS medium.  Is there some way to create an install floppy?

 -> Thayer